SysAid 15.2: Your Voice, Your Service Desk

I have a confession to make: for me, the most exciting times, in the realm of my job, which I have the privilege to take part in, are the official releases of SysAid Help Desk Software. Even today, after orchestrating over a dozen On-Premise official releases, I still get the same excitement and butterflies in my stomach….

I am writing this blog after finalizing a great beta with our Pathfinders who helped test and fine-tune this release so it will be optimized for all of you.

The content of this release is especially focused on your requests. 100% of the enhancements and fixes came directly from all of you — our customers. We always put resources on issues and challenges you raise to us; this time we put all of our resources on your issues.

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What’s New in SysAid 15.2?

I would like to pick a few of the enhancements that I think are particularly worthy of sharing their story. The first bunch of enhancements is related to the SysAid Agent. We had several improvements over the past few releases, and 15.2 continues that momentum.

Ability to Download Agent Logs from Within the Asset Form

Simply add the get logs field to the asset form and you’re able to download the logs of any SysAid Agent. This enhancement is actually one of those issues that “helps you help us to help you….” SysAid Agent logs are usually required for our support engineers to help troubleshoot and solve issues that you encounter. Our agent for Windows is installed on millions of machines worldwide, and the variety of OS versions and flavors challenges us every once in a while. SysAid has an extensive lab where we test and re-create issues, but no lab can simulate your real environments. So when you report issues, the logs help us improve our agent. We just made retrieving these logs much easier for you, and it will definitely help us improve in helping you :).

Ability to Set Various Agent Settings from the Asset List

Continuing the agent improvements, you can now set various agent settings from the asset list, by simply selecting a single asset or a group of assets and changing their settings. This comes in very useful when you want to activate or update features on your agents, as you can easily do it from the asset list. It also keeps track of the version of the agent settings, so you can have better visibility on what settings the agents are using.

Efficiently Stop the Agent from Running

The last feature in this set is an efficiency feature — the option to stop the SysAid Agent from running when it loses connection with the SysAid Server. This is done in cases where the SysAid Agent fails to contact the SysAid Server over a very long period of time, so you can assume that something is wrong and it will never be able to contact the server. The new feature in 15.2 makes the agent give up trying by stopping the service, i.e. the SysAid Agent.

The idea behind this is to be more efficient in cases where due to wrong settings, or any other environmental change, the agent can’t reach the server, creating unnecessary network traffic. In most of these cases, the issue won’t be able to be resolved from the server anyway, so we just taught the agent to give up trying until told otherwise. Once the issue is locally resolved, you can simply start the service again and set it to run on startup.

Third-Party Integrations

Third party integrations are a great way to enhance the capabilities of SysAid with other software. For SysAid 15.2, we developed a mechanism that allows you to dynamically add these integrations as “add ons”. One small ZIP file contains all the magic required to integrate SysAid with LogMeIn, Bomgar, Google Apps, and more. The greatest thing about having this mechanism in place is that we can now provide you with add-ons that, in most cases, won’t require a server upgrade. Over the next few months, we’ll be making available a large set of add-ons that will work with 15.2 and future versions.

Security Fixes

We also tightened SysAid security by fixing multiple security vulnerabilities that were discovered. As you know, new security threats pop up all the time, which is why we have a dedicated process and team to handle these threats and provide a quick turnaround. SysAid 15.2 includes a new set of enhancements that tighten the security surrounding the database, uploading files, and more.
This release has a lot more enhancements and improvements, and I am sure you will all enjoy them. We’re already busy working on the next set of enhancements and can’t wait to deliver them to you! Meanwhile, though, you can check out this video we prepared that goes through many of the 15.2 enhancements.

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